Alice

~Calmness

Alice is still leaning against the wall when he steps into the room. She does not look at him, does not move and has lost any sense of time. She does not know how long it’s been since she pushed her away, since she first sat here and stopped thinking at all.
She is calm. So calm she can’t even remember when she was that calm the last time. She is ignoring everything, just leaning against the wall with closed eyes, without knowing that he was watching her the whole time from the outside.
He was beside here the whole three days she lay here and slept, watching her and looking for her. He studied every movement she made and watched here like she was some interesting science phenomenon. She was for him. She still is.
He does not need sleep, just some ease from time to time and he found it looking at her.
He watched her from the outside, through a hole in the door so she could not see him. He watched her while she destroyed everything in the room and them broke down in its ruin. He watched her while she fought her and it made him proud.
It showed him that not everything was lost, that there was a chance. A chance she gave them.
He goes to her very slowly, watching how her chest rises and falls and he knows she is hearing him.
He does not know why but he knows she does. There is a small tension in her that is always there when she is awake. Only in her sleep it vanishes from time to time.
He can see that she knows he’s coming so he did not try to be quiet.
The table is knocked over so he puts the tray in front of her and lowers himself down to her.
He is eye to eye with Alice when she opens hers and looks at him. He can’t see fear only a cleavage of minds behind her big, sad eyes which seems to last since the beginning ot time.
Since she saw what no human has ever seen before.
Alice crooks her head to the site and examines him.
Her eyes wander from his naked feed over his rangy body with his pale green skin. She examines his grazed arms with the light thin scars which cover his inner arms. She’s tracing them lightly with her fingers without even touching them.
The air crackles on places she’s close to him but she ignores it. Her fingers find her way to his neck.
Something that looks like a black tattoo forms around his collarbones, vanishing behind is shoulders in a dinky brown pullover with rolled up sleeves.
Her eyes move up and over his beautiful applegreen lips which look so normal on him and so incredibly soft, over the shaggy hair, which does not only look but sound like leaves moving in the wind when he stirs his head to see her better and through which two pointy eartips peep.
She remains at his eyes, so warm and golden like leaves in the autumn sun.
Slowly Alice lifts her arm, almost as if she was afraid he would be gone if she moved too fast. He just looks at her and waits.
Lets her fingers sweep over his cheek whose skin feels like the surface of a leaf, let them wander to his hair which feels like fresh spring grass.
He let it happen when she’s drawing back, just looking at him.
“You are really here”, she says and her voice is hoarse because she screamed for days.
“Yes”, he says nodding. Her eyes go to the plate he pushes toward her.
“I thought you might be hungry.”
Alice shakes her head but he knows that her stomach is aching at the sight of food, salad from its garden, toffee from its stock and cake it had ordered to be baked. It said him to bring it so he did.
Alice swallows and wants to say something but she needs two tries until her voice sound almost normal. She has trouble concentrating because the food deflects her.
His presence dazzles her. She knows him, he sat at her window and watched her just like he does right now with his strange yellow eyes.
She opens her mouth and is finally able to ask “Where am I?”
“Back”, he says like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, crooking his head again.
“Back where?” Her voice is shaking because she fears to know the answer already.
“At the entrance.”
“Which entrance?”  This time she knows the answer for sure. She does not want to hear it and yet she had to ask. She wants to go back to the calmness where she came from.
“To the rabbit hole.